Why Do You Say You’re Black?

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CreditXia Gordon

By Morgan Jerkins

Jan. 27, 2018

When I went away to college at Princeton, 70 miles from where I grew up in New Jersey, I studied foreign languages, which is where I felt the most confident. I made friends with other black women and people of color, and we served as mental and emotional support for one another. I also met a 40-something European woman who became a crucial part of my college experience.

She was an academic administrator in one of the departments where I took a number of classes and became one of my biggest supporters. I would email her in a panic about how to manage my time; she would write back to reassure me about how well I was doing. In the exclusive environment I was studying in, those words carried me.

Two years after I graduated, I had accumulated some professional success as a journalist. I published an article on black women’s writing and sacred spaces, and my old friend, the administrator, got in touch to congratulate me. She asked if I would like to come to her home for lunch, and when I accepted, she wrote back to say that her aunt and uncle would be there. They were interested in getting to know me, a student whom their niece had talked about, and they often visited her.

When I arrived for lunch, her aunt greeted me with a hug, but the aunt’s husband stood in front of me, emotionless, his cold blue eyes fixed on my face. I nervously smiled and said hello; then the aunt tugged at her husband’s arm and said: “Say something to her in Russian. She speaks Russian. Say something to her in Russian.” He held up his right hand, and she said no more. My skin constricted. I had studied the language for four years, had traveled to the country and could even read medical science and technology articles without using a dictionary. I could handle whatever he threw at me, but I did not trust that he would be easy on me. He might pepper his sentences with archaic words not taught in Russian classes, and if I did not respond quickly enough, he would think I was a liar.

But instead he said, in English, “I read your articles.”

My shoulders dropped. “Oh, yeah?” I replied as we made our way to the living room, where her aunt urged me to drink white wine.

Just then, we were called into the dining room. The aunt sat on my left and the uncle on my right. As I placed pear-and-arugula salad and some vegetables on my plate, he finally spoke.

“Morgan, I am sorry for not talking much. It’s just that you confuse me.”

“I confuse you? How do I confuse you?” I chuckled and picked at my plate.

“Forgive me for what I am about to ask. I’m not from here. I’ve lived here for many years and worked as a doctor. I have been around plenty black men, but you are the first black woman who I have ever met. It’s just that I don’t understand why you would want to call yourself black. Why not just call yourself a human? Now, it is obvious that you are a woman. But do you have to be a black woman? Why can’t you be a human?”

My friend interjected. “Morgan, you have to forgive my uncle. He’s not from here and sometimes he says things that are …” Her voice tapered off.

“No, it’s O.K.,” I said. I twisted my upper body toward him and said: “I call myself a black woman because that’s what I am. I can be both a black woman and a human. Those two identities aren’t separate from each other.”

“But why would you call yourself black?” he persisted. “To me, you are not black. You do not present yourself as a black woman, or at least the ones who I’ve heard about. You went to Princeton, you speak many foreign languages, you travel. If this were many decades ago, I might have married you.”

I refused to make eye contact with the aunt. Now the tension had escalated. Had his stare been underscored by his attraction to me, his inability to see me as both a black woman and a human, or both?

It was unfathomable to me that this man could have lived for four or five decades in America and never interacted with a black woman. If I had to be the first, so be it. But that was not what I’d signed up for when I agreed to come to lunch.

Why would I call myself a black woman when I could just be a human? Why?

I used to believe that being both black and a woman could be extracted from my humanity like teeth weaseled from the gums. Or at the very least ignored for momentary psychological relief. I began to study Japanese as a freshman in college and was able to converse and read in the language when I took an internship in Tokyo two years later. When I was in Japan, I thought of myself as merely a “gaijin,” or foreigner. Not any different from my fellow interns, many of whom were white.

That was June 2013, and two days before I was scheduled to fly back to the United States, I read on Twitter that George Zimmerman, who had fatally shot the teenager Trayvon Martin, had been acquitted of murder. I couldn’t sleep because I was afraid that I would be met with terrifying dreams. Then I realized in the midst of that chaos that there is no place I could go, no language within which I could hide, where I would not be reminded of my race and gender.

And why would I want to hide these markers under the guise of “human” when so much of my reality is different? We can point to the 2016 election as a prime example. I cannot be grouped under simply “human” because that default is “white,” and, I have come to understand, some white people do not seem concerned with my protection or safety.

If a white person asks a black woman why she cannot just be a human, he or she is asking, Why can’t you be like me? Why can’t you participate in the fiction that there is such a thing as being “human,” and that race and gender combined negate the former label? The problem with this seemingly harmless question is that such an interrogation demonstrates how white people can understand or digest people of color only through their own criteria.

I live in Harlem, a historically black neighborhood even while it’s rapidly gentrifying. I am made aware of my blackness and womanhood from the moment I step out the door, whether it’s because of street harassment or a dialect that another black person uses toward me as a sign of solidarity and comfort. I grew up in suburban New Jersey, and these experiences were rather new to me at first. Yet they taught me that I am not an affront to anybody. My identity does not bring about confusion.

I can’t slice away at my identity as though it were made up of individual parts; no person of color can. Furthermore, we should not have to. It has been my conditioning as a black woman in this country to make others comfortable even while I live my life. I have to constantly learn how to prioritize myself and that is, first and foremost, to reject questions about my identity and refuse to consider ways in which to divide myself to be understood. This is me. Nothing can be disassembled. I am here and I am whole.

Morgan Jerkins is the author of the essay collection “This Will Be My Undoing,” from which this is adapted.